Hyphens in URLs - Are Hyphens in URLs Good or Bad for SEO

[John]

Google recommend to use hyphens instead of underscores... Google see each hyphened word as individual word.
e.g. For URL www.A-B-C, Google will give result for A, B and C...
On the other hand for www.A_B_C, Google will give result for A B C.
Use 3-5 words in URL otherwise your URL will lose the weight.

You cannot use underscores in domain names at all, it is just not possible even if you wanted to.
The only place you can use them is in file or folder names.

[Almo99]

Hyphens are okay but you want people to remember your site name. Having an easy to remember domain name is important.

[MetaSEO]

Hyphens in URLs - Are Hyphens in URLs Good or Bad for SEO

Actually, I would recommend you use only hyphens. Hyphens are known by search engines as word separators. They seem to understand hyphens better than underscores.

[NickTyler81]

Also if you use underscore between the words in an underlined live link it gets lost and looks like an actual space. probably niot bad for the engines but could be bad for users trying to remember your URL?

[LD]

I am sure that is how they got so popular, clever was it not?

What about bobsexcavation.com?

[LD]

It has been my experience that hyphens have been helpful for SEO.

Helpful for SEO, how?

[SuperMan]

Hyphen are fine for SEO however, I would rather not use them. But I do own many sites with 1 or 2 hyphens that rank well. I would not use more than 2 hyphens. But do beware that many people view URLs with hyphen as sort of spammy...

[Macsheen]

Using hyphen in the url is always seo friendly. Use hyphens instead of underscores. Please see this Google suggestion to know more about url structures.
google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=76329

[deepsand]

Google recommend to use hyphens instead of underscores... Google see each hyphened word as individual word.
e.g. For URL www.A-B-C, Google will give result for A, B and C...
On the other hand for www.A_B_C, Google will give result for A B C.
Use 3-5 words in URL otherwise your URL will lose the weight.

You seem to be confused.

You say that "Google see each hyphened word as individual word." You also say the its sees A-B-C as A, B and C, which are also individual words!

In fact, quickly performed tests show that Google easily parses Word1Word2Word3, Word1-Word2-Word3, and Word1_Word2_Word3 into Word1 Word2 Word3.

Do searches for pennstateticketman, penn-state-ticket-man, and penn_state_ticket_man, and note that in each case the top organic listing is for Penn State Ticket Man.

Also note that, further down on each of the 3 SERP pages is a match on PennStateTicketMan.

[deepsand]

hmmmm...interesting. URLs in my site using underscores. It is too late for me to go back and change underscores to hyphens.

Don't worry; that's not a problem.

See my post, directly above yours, demonstrating that they are treated equally in query strings.